The 4 best cheap laptops for 2026: Not all budget laptops are slow, flimsy clunkers

Last year’s Snapdragon X-powered Acer Aspire 16 AI is the best entry-level Windows laptop I’ve tested. If you’re looking for an affordable, well-equipped computer with fantastic battery life and a large, smooth screen – and you need something more energetic than a Chromebook – this one’s hard to beat. Plus, it’s quite portable for its size.

Note: The Acer Aspire 16 2026 will be configurable with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and AMD Ryzen AI 400 Series processors. It will be available in the second quarter, but we don’t know its price yet.

Out of all the laptops on this list, I think this one beats its price point the most. To tell the truth, it’s almost light undervalued for everything he brings.

Internally, it comes with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage – double that of the base MacBook Air – and a competent Snapdragon X chip. In the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark, our main performance test, this processor earned a multi-core score of 9,802. (This tells us how well it can handle multitasking and more intensive applications. The higher the score, the better.) Of all the laptops we’ve tried that cost less than $900, that’s the highest score we’ve seen. Notably, this makes it significantly faster than two of the sleekest Chromebooks on the market, which cost about the same: the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 (7,680) and the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514 (7,187).

As an aside, I would like to point out that the Snapdragon X chip is an ARM-based processor. Without going into too much detail, this means that it is not compatible with some specialized applications. (This is also something that plagues the Zenbook A14, below.) This is mostly an issue if you need a budget laptop for college classes or light gaming, but since the Aspire 16 AI is geared more toward general everyday use, I consider it a non-issue here.

The most important thing to remember is that the Snapdragon X chip doesn’t consume too much juice. In our video test, the Aspire 16 AI lasted 17 hours and 22 minutes before dying. Our current median battery life for Windows laptops is 14 hours, so that’s an overshoot. That’s in line with most laptops powered by Qualcomm’s first-generation Snapdragon chips.

I think most buyers will like the Aspire 16 AI’s display, featuring an anti-glare finish, touchscreen capabilities, and a variable 120Hz refresh rate. It could still be brighter and sharper, but these specs are decidedly decent for $700. (MacBook Air M4s still have a mediocre 60Hz refresh rate.)

This is a 16-inch laptop, so you get a good amount of screen real estate, but not at the cost of extra weight. At 3.42 pounds, the Aspire 16 AI is pretty darn light for its size and not too heavy to carry around. Apple’s current 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs 4.7 pounds, for reference.

The Aspire 16 AI’s “budget” is most evident in its knobby speakers and mediocre webcam. (I thought her photo looked sharp, but she blunts and flattens her subject in a way that almost makes it look posterized.) Her hinge is also a bit wavy.